Blog #9: Not Just One

In Jeet Thayil's poem "Spiritus Mundi," the speaker takes a singular notion of what identity could mean and expands it. The identity of the speaker stretches through time and place, through lived experiences of family and of nation. An expanded sense of identity is reflected in the title "Spiritus Mundi," which is W.B. Yeats' term to describe the collective soul of the universe that stretches throughout time--literally "world soul" in Latin. His combination of collective perspectives--from the speaker's present to Shah Jahan (the Badshah who had the Taj Mahal built)-- reinforces the hybridity of identities rather than a monocultural identity, "I call the days by their Hindu / names and myself by my Christian one" (208).

This recognition is in sharp contrast with the racism that permeated the U.S. and U.K. post-9/11, an event which the speaker specifically cites as deeply scarring his, and others', memory: "I don't recall the summer / of 2001. Did it exist? / There would have been sun and rain. / I was there, I don't remember / a time before autumn of that year" (207-8).

Thayil's poem spans 45 years, several different geographic locations, and contains a couple of images where animals and weather also participate in this identity-crossing: the speaker hears the koel "in the call of a barn owl" and see a "mouse deer start[] across / the grass" while the "sky drains to a distant eddy" (208).

This is a mouse-deer-- They aren't mice nor are they deer!

As the poem winds towards its center, these observations of nature, past, and city move the poem towards its center where "All things combine and recombine". This moment gets to the emotional core, where the speaker notes "I'm my father and my son grown old. / Everything that lives, lives on". This ending of the poem is what ultimately compelled me to delve into the work. The expansive, almost omnipotent perspective the speaker takes as he zooms through time and space felt detached, and suddenly the speaker lands within the complicated web of family, an identity that contains numerous others. We are made up of the land, history, and people around us, a polyvocal, multicultural, cross-pollinating experience.